


Coping Mechanisms

by ilostmyshoe



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Insomnia, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 10:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5124521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe/pseuds/ilostmyshoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Recovery is anything but a straight line. Sometimes you have to fight the same battles over and over again. And sometimes the hardest battles are the ones you fight alone, in the dark, against yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coping Mechanisms

Fred wakes in the middle of the night with her heart racing and all of her muscles clenched tight, trying to keep the uncontrollable shaking underneath her sternum from spreading to the rest of her body.

She’s not sure what woke her. The room is quiet, dark, and secure. Charles is sleeping soundly beside her. The quickly receding remnants of her dreams are vague but emotionally neutral—no hint of the vivid terror that marks her nightmares.

Carefully, deliberately, Fred slows her breathing: four slow counts in, hold for four, out for six. Repeat. After a minute she adds her Progressive Muscle Relaxation routine. Start with the _Flexor digitorum longus_ and _Fibularis longus_ , then the _gastrocnemius_ , and so on—up the legs to the torso, out along the arms, and finishing with the _sternocleidomastoid_ , the _trapezius_ , and a series of facial expressions carefully designed to address as many of those forty-two muscles as possible.

When she’s finished, Fred knows her body is as relaxed as she can make it right now, but there’s still the phantom sensation of shaking in her chest. It doesn’t stop. Why won’t it fucking stop? What is her mind doing now?

Fred presses her eyes closed harder and scoots backwards across the bed until she can feel the comforting, solid warmth of Charles’s body all along her back. The heat of his arm seeps quickly through the thin fabric of her tank top. Fred focuses on the physical sensation of it, mentally savoring every square millimeter of contact. She lets her mind drift into visualizing the process of heat transfer at an atomic level—Charles’s atoms freely sharing their energy with her own, coaxing them out of their sluggish ways, until they synchronize in a joyous dance of compromise, echoing the events at the dance club earlier that evening on a microscopic level.

Fred focuses on the memory. She feels the almost-claustrophobic heat of the crowd, the beat of the bass in her bones, the gently reassuring guidance of Charles’s hands on her hips, and the whispering caress of his lips on the back of her neck. She relives that moment of release, the sensation of freedom and letting go of her self-consciousness—of all self-awareness, really—merging completely with the music and the movement.

When the scene shifts to an impromptu spelling bee co-lead by Fred’s 8th grade social studies teacher and Lorne—who keeps demanding that she “put a little soul into it”—Fred is blissfully unaware of the seamless transition from memory to dream.

*   *   *   *   *

Fred wakes in the middle of the night with her heart racing and all of her muscles clenched tight, trying to keep the uncontrollable shaking underneath her sternum from spreading to the rest of her body.

Her first thoughts are a colorful assortment of expletives in English, Latin, German, and Pylean, because all-the-gods-fucking-damn-it, she’d naively believed she was past this.

Sure, things were crazy—when were they ever not?—but she’d thought she was managing her stress pretty well. She’d faced every hit head-on, sliced every epic disaster into manageable slices, and run ruthlessly through her to-do list of concerns ranging from Angel’s unexplained disappearance to Connor finishing the last of the peanut butter. And she hadn’t felt panicky once. Angry? Absolutely. Also terrified, furious, exasperated, and brokenhearted. She’d even felt hopeless a couple of times, but it had all seemed very situationally appropriate—her brain and body reacting as rationally as possible to the insanity of life at Angel Investigations.

This panic is a very different kind of insanity than monsters and demons, a worse one, really, because it’s all in her head.

_I hate this. I hate this. I HATE this._

Fred clenches her fists and her jaw and wills it all to just go away.

_I want to die. I want to die. I want to die._

Wait. No. Hell no.

Fred’s calling bullshit on that one. She fights for her life—and her friends’ lives and the existence of the whole damn world—every single day. She survived alone in infinitely worse conditions for _years_ in Pylea: hunted, hungry, and sometimes delusional, but fighting like hell to stay alive every single day. She is the complete opposite of suicidal; she’s a survivor. The stupid voice in her head doesn’t have a scrap of evidence in its favor, so why won’t it shut the fuck up already?

_I just want to curl up in a ball and cease to exist._

Fred has a sudden vivid vision of herself huddled in a corner of her cave in Pylea, wrapped in a blanket, rocking back and forth. Against all logic, the idea feels comforting, even appealing. Well, okay, that at least she can do. There’s no harm in trying, even if it does seem unlikely to actually make her feel better.

Fred lifts the sheet and slips slowly out of bed, moving carefully and quietly so as not to wake Charles. She grabs an afghan from the chair and steps into the bathroom. Sliding down into the corner between the sink and the wall, she wraps the blanket around her shoulders and knees and over her head, cocooning her entire body. She leans into the reassuring solidity of the cold, tiled wall, rocks ever so slightly, and prays that Charles won’t find her like this—it would break his heart.

If he did find her, she knows he would push aside the overwhelming waves of surprise, confusion, and pity to focus on her needs. He’d kneel down by her side, wrap his arms around her, and pull her tightly against his chest, rocking her gently, and murmuring soothing nothings until she fell asleep.

If given the choice, Charles might even want her to wake him up so that he could comfort her, but Fred can’t bring herself to do it. She knows the image of her crouched in the corner in the dark would haunt him. Every time he looked at her he’d remember the brokenness inside her, and he’d wonder how close it was to the surface, how many more times Fred could shatter before she was beyond repair. Fred couldn’t handle seeing that in his eyes. She needs to protect him from the true depths of her craziness for as long as she can.

So she lets him sleep and tells herself that this is enough: the pressure of the blanket, the firmness of the wall, the knowledge of Charles’s love, and the safety and security of his imagined embrace.

*   *   *   *   *

Fred wakes in the middle of the night with her heart racing and all of her muscles clenched tight, trying to keep the uncontrollable shaking underneath her sternum from spreading to the rest of her body.

She rolls onto her back, adjusts the covers so that she and Charles once again have an equal share, and looks up at the ceiling in the darkness. Determined not to wake him, she breathes in until her lungs can’t hold any more and then breathes out slowly and silently. On her next breath, she starts her series of mental calming activities.

Even as a child, counting sheep never worked for Fred; it was too simple a task to hold her attention, and she found herself instead distracted by questions of whether she was counting different sheep or the same sheep over and over. If they were different sheep, where did they come from? What kind of pen were they going into after she counted them? Was its size expanding, or was it getting more and more crowded as she got higher and higher? If it was the same group of sheep getting counted over and over, how many were in the group? Did they stay in the same order? How did they get back to their starting point? A secondary path? Some automated mechanism? Teleportation? It was all completely beside the point, and not particularly conducive to sleep.

She usually has better luck with more complex, repetitive mathematical sequences. Listing primes in increasing order is an old favorite. Listing all factors of each whole number from one to one hundred or counting down from one thousand by sevens are also fairly reliable tricks.

Tonight, though, nothing works. She can’t seem to get into the right headspace. Fred starts and restarts each sequence at a steady pace, but the numbers quickly accelerate until they’re stumbling over each other in an awkwardly syncopated rush and she has to move on. The numbers feel off—like running your hand over rough plastic where you expected smooth wood, or hearing clanging metal pots and pans in place of the soft, solid thud of familiar footsteps.

Fred sits up to see the clock and finds that barely thirty minutes have passed. It feels like an eternity. The remaining hours of the night stretch ahead of her like an ominous, implacable threat. She can’t bear the idea of lying here, straining for unconsciousness, for even a fraction of that time.

She scoots back slightly so that she’s sitting up in bed, with her back against the headboard, and wraps her arms around her knees. She tilts her head back to rest against the wall, then lets it roll to the side, and finds herself gazing down at Charles.

He really is gorgeous—though every time she tells him so he snorts and changes the subject. The pale glow of the L.A. lights leaks in through a break in the curtains, drawing a line across his shoulder and chest. Fred admires the smooth curves and planes of his body, the way his pectoral muscle and bicep flex as he shifts one arm further across his chest and rolls slightly, turning his body towards her.

She can’t help reaching out and lightly tracing the line of his shoulder and arm with her fingertips. He stirs and she pulls her hand away, worried that she’ll wake him, but after a moment of shifting back and forth, he rolls onto his stomach and settles with one arm under his pillow and the other stretched out in an unconscious invitation.

Fred slides back down under the covers and curls her body around his proffered arm, resting her head on one arm and slipping her other hand into his.

If Fred could draw like Angel she’d spend hours trying to capture Charles’s beauty on paper. She can’t, so she turns to geometry instead. She studies the arcs of his back and shoulders and tries visualize what equations would best map them. Visions of trigonometric and parabolic functions dance before her eyes, caressing his skin in closer and closer approximations. When she’s reasonably satisfied with the fit, she shifts her focus to the line of his nose, the curl of his lips, and the smooth curve of his jaw.

She closes her eyes for just a moment, trying to more clearly picture a potential line of best fit for the convoluted whorls of his ear, and finally drifts off into unconsciousness.

*   *   *   *   *

When Fred opens her eyes again there’s bright sunlight streaming through the windows—it’s morning.

She can hear voices coming from downstairs, Charles is urging her to get dressed for breakfast, and the night’s frustrations fade away like a bad dream.

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, [stars_inthe_sky](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_inthe_sky/pseuds/stars_inthe_sky/works) went above and beyond as a beta reader and a friend.
> 
> The comments and attitudes in this piece (especially those around suicide/suicidal thoughts) are meant to specifically reflect Fred's headspace, and are not a reflection of my beliefs or thoughts about people struggling with those situations and feelings.
> 
> Fwiw, though, many of the anxiety issues are inspired by my personal experience.


End file.
